Skip to main content

Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin

Trinity Menu Trinity Search



Dr. James Hadley
Ussher Assistant Professor, Russian

Biography

James Hadley studied a dual degree of Japanese and computing as his undergraduate. He then went on to study a master's degree in Buddhist Studies before moving on to a second master's degree in translation studies. In 2013, he completed his PhD in translation studies with a thesis challenging the hegemony of a small number of translation theories and cultural contexts in translation studies research outputs. After completing his PhD, James moved to China, where he taught and continued researching translation studies. He then became the translation studies researcher for the University of London's School of Advanced Study before moving to Dublin to take up his current post.

Publications and Further Research Outputs

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Translation Spaces, (2023), Hanna Pięta, James Hadley, Jan Buts, Laura Ivaska, [eds.] Journal, 2023

James Hadley, Systematically Analysing Indirect Translations: Putting The Concatenation Effect Hypothesis to the Test, London; New York, Routledge, 2023 Book, 2023

James Hadley, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Carlos Teixeira, and Antonio Toral, Translation Technologies for Creative-Text Translation, London; New York, Routledge, 2022 Book, 2022

James Hadley, Nell Regan, A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2021 Book, 2021

Alberto Poncelas, Wichaya Pidchamook, Chao-Hong Liu, James Hadley, Andy Way, Multiple Segmentations of Thai Sentences for Neural Machine Translation, Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages and CCURL Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages Workshop, 2020 Journal Article, 2020

Dominic Glynn & James Hadley, Theorising (un)performability and (un)translatability, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 2020 Journal Article, 2020

Alberto Poncelas, Mohammad Aboomar, Jan Buts, James Hadley, Andy Way, A Tool for Facilitating OCR Postediting in Historical Documents, Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages, 2020 Journal Article, 2020

James Hadley, Maria Popović, Haithem Afli, Andy Way(ed.), Qualities of Literary Machine Translation, Dublin Machine Translation Summit, Dublin, August 2019, European Association for Machine Translation, 2019 Proceedings of a Conference, 2019

Rhetoric, oratory, interpreting and translation in, editor(s)Kirsten Malmkjær , The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics, London and New York, Routledge, 2018, pp121 - 132, [James Luke Hadley and Siobhán McElduff] Book Chapter, 2018

James Hadley, The beginnings of literary translation in Japan: an overview, Perspectives, 2018, p1--16 Journal Article, 2018

James Hadley, The Beginnings of Literary Translation In Japan: An Overview, Studies in Translation Theory and Practice , 2018 Journal Article, 2018 URL

James Hadley, Indirect translation and discursive identity: Proposing the concatenation effect hypothesis, Translation Studies, 10, (2), 2017, p183 - 197 Journal Article, 2017 URL

James Hadley, Shifts in Patronage Differentiation: Translations from European Languages in isolationist Japan, Meta, 2016 Journal Article, 2016 URL

Hadley, J., Akashi, M., Translation and celebrity: The translation strategies of Haruki Murakami and their implications for the visibility paradigm, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 23, (3), 2015, p458-474 Journal Article, 2015 DOI

James Hadley, Motoko Akashi, 著名翻訳家・テクスト分析・可視性概念 : 村上春樹にみる同化・異化論の進展, 通訳翻訳研究, 14, 2014, p183 - 201 Journal Article, 2014 TARA - Full Text URL

Hadley, J., Chaucer abducted: Examining the conception of translation behind the Canterbury Tales, New Voices in Translation Studies, 11, (1), 2014, p1-24 Journal Article, 2014 URL

Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications

James Hadley, Roy Youdale. Using Computers in the Translation of Literary Style: Challenges and Opportunities., Machine Translation, 2020 Review, 2020

James Hadley, Beverley Curran, Nana Sato-Rossberg, and Kikuno Tanabe, Multiple translation communities in contemporary Japan, The Translator , 2016, p386 - 389 Review Article, 2016 DOI

James Hadley, Translation in modern Japan, Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice , 2015 Review Article, 2015 URL

James Hadley, Translation in anthologies and collections (19th and 20th centuries), Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice , 2015 Review Article, 2015 URL

James Hadley, Translation theory and development studies: a complexity theory approach, 2014 Review Article, 2014

James Hadley, Roman Theories of Translation: Surpassing the Source, Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice , 2014 Review Article, 2014 URL

Research Expertise

Description

James' research interests are extremely broad and cover everything from the history surrounding early-modern translators between Japanese and Dutch to Digital Humanities approaches to the analysis of lexis in indirect translations (translations of translations). He is currently devoting most of his energies to systematising the study of indirect translations using a range of Digital Humanities methodologies. At the same time, James is emerging as one of the key voices in the rapidly developing sub-field(s) of Literary Machine Translation (LMT) and Computer Assisted Literary Translation (CALT). Both focus on using computers in the production of literary texts in translation. However, where LMT focuses on the challenges associated with computers translating the texts by themselves, CALT focuses on the creation of computer-based tools which can assist human literary translators to work as efficiently as possible and/or as creatively as possible.

Projects

  • Title
    • QuantiQual: Quantifying the Qualities of Indirect Translations
  • Summary
    • The aim of this project is to ask how the qualities of indirect translations can be described and acted on in such a way as to maximise their value for readers. Indirect translations occur when the resources required to translate a text directly from language A to language C are not available. Therefore, the translator first translates the source text into language B, and from this pivot language, translates the text to language C. Both human and machine translators make use of this technique for similar reasons. However, in both cases, indirect translation is seen as a less than desirable work-around, and therefore, has not been a priority when considering the qualities of the final outputs. This project will find ways to describe and ultimately control the qualities of indirect translations. It will use the term "qualities" in the plural in order to acknowledge that translations are produced for many different reasons, for a range of different intended purposes, and that these factors affect the perception of a translation's fitness for purpose. The project will run corpus-based experiments on indirect translations produced by humans, comparing the source texts (A), direct translations (B), and target text (C) with one another and also with a large number of texts in their respective languages to ask how much each confirms to the linguistic norms of its own context. The project will then test machine-produced translations of the same texts into the same languages using the same methodology. The hypothesis is that indirect translations tend to lose cultural markers specific to the source language, and that the language of indirect translations tends to be highly normalised to the target language. The aim is to test this hypothesis, and ultimately to find methods for controlling these qualities in texts translated by humans and machines alike.
  • Funding Agency
    • IRC
  • Date From
    • 2019
  • Date To
    • 2021
  • Title
    • Terry Pratchett Research Group
  • Summary
    • I am one of the founding members of the Terry Pratchett Research Group. This group is a team of individuals drawn from across the college, all of whom have research interests that draw on or are linked to author Terry Pratchett's life and work. It includes researchers working in Children's Literature, Digital Humanities, and, of course, Literary Translation. Trinity College Library has one of the most complete collections of Terry Pratchett's work in the world, and the main aim of the research group is to make this collection as accessible as possible to promote creative, groundbreaking research outputs. This project has recently been generously awarded seed funding by Trinity Long Room Hub's Research Incentive Scheme for 2018-19.
  • Funding Agency
    • Trinity Long Room Hub
  • Date From
    • 2018
  • Date To
    • 2019

Keywords

Asian Languages/Literature; Asian Religions; Chinese Language/Literature; Creative Arts; English Language/Literature; European History; History of Philosophy; Japanese history of the Tokugawa period; Japanese Language/Literature; Language and/or Literature, Medieval; Language and/or Literature, Modern; Language and/or Literature, Non-Fiction; Language and/or Literature, Renaissance; Language and/or Literature, Translation; Language and/or Literature, Victorian; Linguistic analyses of contemporary literature; Linguistics; Literature and cultural history of the Enlightenment; Medieval Europe; Non-Western History; Sociolinguistics; Translation; Translation studies

Recognition

Representations

I worked in the capacity of a consultant for the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and the Institute of Modern Languages Research, two institutes of the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in the creation of a new Master's Degree in Legal Translation Studies 2017-2019

I sit of the steering committee of the Petra-e framework, a group of universities from across Europe that all teach and/or research Literary Translation Studies 2017

I was part of the organising committee of the Translation Studies Network of Ireland Conference 2019 2019

Awards and Honours

IRC COALESCE Research Fund 2018

Trinity Long Room Hub Research Incentive Scheme 08/01/2019

早稲田大学:国際共同研究推進・招聘費補助制度 [Waseda University: Advanced International Research Collaboration Assistance Grants] 05/04/2019

Private Research Funding from Estate of Terry Pratchett 01/09/2022

Private Research Funding from John Gillespie May 2020

Memberships

Irish Humanities Alliance board member 2022 – Present

Editorial Board of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice (journal) 2019 – Present

Board Member of Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation 2017 – Present

Steering group member of PETRA-e framework 2017 – Present

Steering group member of TSNI group (Translation Studies Network Ireland) 2018 – Present

Active member of IndirecTrans, the world's leading research network for scholars of Indirect Translation 2018